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3 Ways to Supercharge Your LinkedIn Marketing Today for Tomorrow’s Growth

December 22, 2022 No Comments

What are the best tips to make LinkedIn your champion marketing channel? Here’s your answer.

LinkedIn is “the place to be” for online professional networking. But why is that? Why do more than 830 million business professionals from over 200 countries use the platform?

There’s no simple answer, but there are a few foundational reasons to employ a LinkedIn marketing campaign: to grow your professional network, to identify high-quality leads, to drive targeted traffic to your website and to share thought-leadership content.

Knowing why you should use LinkedIn is a good start, but it’s only that. A generic approach isn’t likely to generate the results you’re seeking. You need to supercharge your LinkedIn marketing efforts, and here are three of the best ways to do so.

Ask your team for help

You can make a lot of noise on LinkedIn as a single person, but there’s no reason to stop there. Ask your team to get involved. As the most reputable and reliable advocates of your brand, they can expand your reach in just a few short minutes each day.

Ensure that all employees have updated their profiles to reflect their position at your company. Request that they follow your company page. Encourage them to share personal and brand-related updates. And of course, support them on their quest to provide value to their audience.

Another idea is to create a LinkedIn Group related to your industry. This is a win-win. It’s a place for your team to share news, guidance, and advice with interested parties, while also building an audience that you can use to your advantage in the future.

If resources allow for it, hire a dedicated employee or contractor to manage your LinkedIn marketing strategy. With a singular focus, this person can make a bigger impact in a shorter period of time. It’s not required, but keep it on your radar.

Consistently publish relevant, insightful content

A social network with so many users is sure to generate quite a bit of low-quality content, but you don’t want to be part of this group. Be part of the group that consistently publishes relevant, insightful and actionable content. That’s how you stand out from the crowd.

Creating engaging content is a trial-and-error process. It takes time to pinpoint your audience’s needs and find a cadence that works for you, so don’t jump ship too soon. It could take days, weeks or even months to hit your content-related goals for the first time.

Increase your odds of success by:

Consistently sharing content (1x/day, 2x/day, 5x/week, etc.).
Publishing unique (not rehashed) insights
Tracking what does and doesn’t work and adjusting accordingly

Also, keep in mind that publishing original content is only one piece of the puzzle. It’s good practice to engage with your audience in the comment section of their posts. Share your take, answer questions and — when appropriate — send direct messages to continue the conversation in private.

Don’t bite off more than you can chew early on. Start slowly to gain your footing and to better understand the wants and needs of your audience. As you settle in, ramp up content production without sacrificing quality. A slow and steady ascent is the best approach.

Get serious about analytics for your content

This one word — analytics — can be the difference between success and failure on LinkedIn. Creating content is only the start. Knowing what’s resonating with your audience is what really matters. This allows you to continually adjust your strategy with the goal of reaching a larger audience and boosting engagement.

You can view analytics for all types of LinkedIn content including short-form posts, articles, videos, images, polls and events. This includes data such as:

Engagements
Discovery
Impressions by demographics
Article performance
Video performance

These insights are needed to understand the impact your content has on your audience. Soon enough, you’ll have the data you need to determine what type of content generates the best response. You can then create more content that matches what’s worked to date.

While it’s important to get serious about analytics for your LinkedIn content, don’t let it cloud your vision. Know what matters most to you — such as making industry connections or generating leads — and create content that points you in that direction. Vanity metrics will make you feel good, but they don’t always have the intended impact on your bottom line.

Repurpose your LinkedIn content

The guidance above will help you supercharge your LinkedIn marketing, but it can do more than that. It’s a good jumping-off point for growth on other platforms and channels marketing professionals will use to their advantage.

Examples include repurposing the content for publication on Twitter and Facebook, using it as a foundation for blog content or sharing it with your email list via a weekly newsletter. When you repurpose content, you give it new life. And with that, you’re taking the steps necessary to establish your authority and grow your brand on other platforms.

By Austin Rotter

Sourced from Entrepreneur

In News

How to use business emails as an additional marketing channel

May 28, 2020 No Comments

By Nick Hladush

An email has long been the most efficient way to communicate in business. This channel has numerous advantages comparing to chats, phone calls, or live meetings. An ability to exchange any kind of content is arguably the most valuable aspect here, which is what makes email a productive marketing channel.

However, many business people don’t know how to implement marketing messages into their email communication effectively. With up to 25 emails sent every day, how do you make them all promote your product or service?

Problems with using email signature marketing channel

Email signatures have long been used for achieving greater results with email marketing campaigns. However, according to Newoldstamp’s business email marketing report, 41% of email signature users install them for branding and increasing business visibility only.

Why is it so? Well, an email signature is usually considered a nice addition to business correspondence. You can create a professional one, adding your company website and logo, as well as social media pages. But does it really amplify marketing efforts?

Marketing vs. Branding

Surely, branding is an essential part of marketing. But it doesn’t end there, not with email signatures. In addition to simply having your company information dangling at the bottom of every email, you can use email signatures to promote content or bring value to the recipients.

This implies updating signatures more than once in a while, which seems to be a problem for 35% of users (according to the same report). People simply don’t know why they should update their signatures more often.

What makes email signature marketing difficult?

Among the biggest difficulties that people face when setting up email signature marketing are generating leads, tracking the performance, and setting marketing KPIs. Which means they don’t consider email signatures a converting channel.

Learn to use the most of your email signature marketing

So, how can you make your business email signatures perform as a part of the marketing strategy? Actually, it’s not that hard. The first thing you need to do is realize that this small addition to emails is a complete marketing tool.

The obvious aspect of setting up an email signature is branding. Your logo, company colours, website link, and social media icons are essential. Once you have that added to your signature, as well as your employees’, you can proceed.

Set up email signature banner campaigns

Many email signature marketing tools allow users to choose a special promo banner or upload one. But what makes this whole banner routine really worth the time is scheduling and changing them according to specific variables.

For example, you can have a default banner that will always be in your team’s email signatures. And when you have a new feature or a nice blog post that you want to promote, you can set a banner dedicated to this matter. In this way, you get an advertising element right in your emails.

Create different signatures for different departments

Email signature management does not necessarily end on setting up identical signatures for everyone. Separate your marketing, sales, HR departments and create unique signatures for each member of the specific group.

Obviously, sales and HR have different things to promote. For instance, any sales manager should have a call schedule button in their email signature while HRs could link new vacancies to the banner in the email footer.

Email signature marketing and business correspondence

Now that we’ve mentioned all the benefits of email signature marketing, you might be wondering how to use it effectively in your daily communication.

The most important takeaway is that you should update your email signature regularly. There’s always going to be some content that you will need to promote. As email signature marketing takes little to no time and resources, use it to its most.

Change your email signature banner to keep it up-to-date. Every single email sent may result in a conversion. So, help your recipients by guiding them to the content you need them to see.

In addition to all that, you can try A/B testing different variations of signatures. Sometimes a CTA button will be enough and other cases might require a distinct email signature banner. Try to find out what fits your style of communication.

Conclusion

Email signature marketing is a powerful yet underrated channel. As the Newoldstamp business email marketing report suggests, too many people don’t use its full potential. Hopefully, this small guide will help you realize how beneficial an email signature can be and how to utilize them efficiently.

By Nick Hladush

Sourced from TechGenyz

In News

An Early Warning Sign to Change Your Social Media Strategy

August 1, 2017 No Comments

By Ryan Holmes.

Treating social media as just another marketing channel? Tread lightly. A user revolt is brewing.

Fake. It’s a word that gets mentioned a lot these days when we talk about social media. Fake news. Fake followers. Real people sharing fake, filtered versions of their lives.

It’s enough to make you stop and wonder: Is there something inherently wrong with social media? Is it bad for us? It it … evil?

This isn’t a new question. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. My life and career are wrapped up in social media. I know it’s sometimes tempting to dismiss social networks as time sucks … or even threats to civilization. But this is too simplistic. The truth, I think, is much closer to an old adage:

The day after fire was invented, someone invented arson.

Social media, just like fire, is a technology. It’s neither good nor evil. You can use it to bring warmth and light into your life. Or you can use it to burn, harm, and destroy.

For some people, social media is a valuable tool that brings together family and friends, raises awareness for social causes and gives us something to scroll through when we’re bored. For others, it becomes a tool for exploitation, an unhealthy addiction, even a vehicle to spread hate and violence.

Ultimately, the impact is in our hands. Social media, as the name suggests, is just the medium–not the message.

The social paradox

Having said that, it’s not hard to understand the haters. In some respects, social media has done a 180. In the beginning, it was about living out loud–an antidote to slick corporate messages and imagery pushed out over TV and in magazines. Facebook was revolutionary precisely because it was real–immediate and unfiltered. On Twitter, people really did share photos of their breakfast.

But that’s changed. The gold standard in social media these days is something that’s “Instagram-worthy.” Instead of a raw look at real life, we get an impossibly beautiful and polished version of life–cropped, filtered … largely fictitious. Even when it’s our own face. The popular Facetune app, for example, makes it possible for anyone to airbrush their features to model-worthy perfection. (And, more often than not, these perfect people on Instagram are actually trying to sell us something.)

That same craving for fakeness and excess partly explains the prevalence of fake news and clickbait. As our news feeds get increasingly crowded, it’s hard to resist gravitating to splashy, tabloid headlines, even when we sense something just doesn’t add up. Fakeness is a lot like trans fat in that way–tempting but just empty calories; irresistible but ultimately damaging.

A real-ness revolt

But it’s critical to remember social media isn’t just that. And it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it’s not hard to see a countermovement afoot–a push to reclaim social media’s roots. Snapchat started it. Disappearing pics gave people license to be real again. Silly lenses helped us let our hair down. Instead of worrying about projecting a personal brand, we actually started communicating.

Thankfully, other networks have begun to get the message, too. Facebook Live videos are proving so popular because you only get one take–no re-dos. Instagram Stories already has 250 million users in large part because it’s a lot more interesting to watch an unedited video of someone than to look at a picture that’s been Photoshopped to death.

Intimacy and authenticity are regaining a foothold. Especially among younger users, fake is out. Teens have taken to starting “finsta” accounts–friends-only Instagram profiles–so they can share a “less edited, less filtered version of their lives.” The newfound popularity of the Minutiae app–which alerts users at a random time and challenges them to share a “mundane” picture of their actual surroundings–is another testament to this real-ness revolt.

Social media lessons for businesses

So, where does this leave all the companies today who rely on social media to connect with customers? To me, it’s an early warning. Social media has grown into an invaluable business tool. (In fact, my company is built on that fact.) But treating social media as business as usual is a recipe for failure.

More than other channels, social media marketing requires creativity, reinvention and breaking rules. Because there are no gatekeepers, people are constantly pushing the limits and demanding more real-ness and more honesty. Businesses that have grown used to treating social media as just another mass marketing channel may have a rough road ahead.

The key, instead, is to find ways to reclaim social media’s personal and human roots. Granted, doing this at scale isn’t easy. But the more that businesses are able to share candid updates and connect with people on an individual level, the greater the impact that their messages will have. Getting actual employees on board–and even executives–can go a long way to breathing life back into dry corporate social media channels. Tracking “meaningful relationship moments“–not vanity metrics like Likes or RTs–is also a step in the right direction.

The alternative isn’t pretty. A rebellion is brewing. Social media may be more prevalent than ever, but news streams today are as likely to be greeted with skepticism as with enthusiasm. Honesty, transparency and authenticity are re-emerging as the new standard. Anything less is playing with fire.

Image Credit: Getty Images

By Ryan Holmes

Founder and CEO, Hootsuite@invoker